No one loves treats more than us, so on this - our favorite holiday - we’d like to announce one for you: SparkFun now offers free economy shipping worldwide on orders $60 and up!

If you’ve been with us for a while you know that we’ve offered short-term deals on shipping in the past - on Cyber Monday 2012 we offered free shipping on all orders for one day, and last summer we tested out free shipping for a week in July. This time, IT’S FOR REAL. Or at least we hope it will be. Here’s how it works: When you (anyone - customers, distributors, educators, robots) place an order over $60, you’ll be given an option for one free shipping method (domestic or international) at check out. And that’s it!*

*That’s not it - if your shipping cost is over $500, you won’t see an automatic option for free shipping, and you’ll need to contact customerservice@sparkfun.com (Also, what are you BUILDING?!).

Free shipping isn’t a groundbreaking discovery, and you may be wondering why we’ve waited until now to offer it. SparkFun ships to…almost every country (145 this year so far!), and our catalog and shipping costs are extremely varied. We’ve wanted to provide free shipping to our customers for years, and it’s been a challenge to get the math right and make sure free shipping is a viable option for both you AND us. We actually launched free shipping quietly a week ago, and after checking out the preliminary numbers we’ve decided to stick with it! For how long? Well, right now it’s firmly open-ended, and the rules and program may change as we evaluate the cost to us and the benefit to you, but for now, happy shipping, and happy Halloween!

Edit: In case you’re wondering what Halloween is like around these parts, check out today’s costumed revelry:

Really? When I finally clicked on it I got a supermodel and a speedboat. Unfortunately it was in that order. Now I have to figure out how to get the boat out of my cubicle and then clean up the squished supermodel.

To catch the ghost, (at least in Firefox, haven’t tried other browsers)
1) Click on some hyperlink like the up-vote number in the comment headers and keep your mouse button held down
2) Wait for the ghost to appear and stop moving
3) While continuing to hold the mouse button down, move the cursor on top of the ghost
4) Let up on the button and re-click as fast as possible
5) You should now have a captured ghost you can move around along with a little circle with a line going through the middle.

This is a long time coming so I will be looking for some stuff from Sparkfun…I have shopped other places, like www.prplsqrl.com , to get things with free shipping cause I tend to buy a lot of things at one time.

$150 order on October 14th, and my shipping came to $46!!! If I’d have waited a week, I’d have got my shipping for free! What’s the chance of Sparkfun pulling an Apple and rebating customers who paid for shipping for a certain period of time before they rolled out the offer?

I think we’re probably not going to do this, if for no other reason than that it’d be painful to figure out who would have been eligible and a mechanism for refunding those dollars. Your order, for example, used a shipping method that wouldn’t have been free under the current plan. It seems like the only approximately fair way to go about this would be to assume that everyone who might have had the option would have taken it, and then refund them the full amount they paid (rather a lot more money than the low-end free option, in many cases). And then of course there is the question of what to say to the people who ordered (certain-period-of-time + 1 day) ago, whose shipping also might have been free if they’d only waited that one day, and the question of how our accounting should handle this change in revenue for all the (certain-period-of-time) orders…

This is our third go-round at free shipping. Once last Cyber Monday (Monday after Thanksgiving) for just a day, then a week in July. Each time was to test the waters to see if we could afford to do it long term. It took us a while, while working on lots of other projects, to figure out how we wanted to run it, so now here it is. It’s open-ended so you can expect to be around for an undetermined amount of time. Also, we won’t go turning it off at a moment’s notice should we suddenly need to. There will be a fair warning with plenty of time to enjoy it while it lasts.

Until then, there’s no deadline. We just have a free shipping program now. =D

Not to sound ungrateful, but I think this is a necessary change that was a long time coming. Given the premium price of many generic parts, and the larger availability of parts from competing vendors, you’ve gotta stay competitive. Shipping charges from Sparkfun have, in the past, made me seek out other vendors because I don’t want to be paying 1/3rd-1/6th the price of what I’m buying in additional shipping. It really adds up, and is especially amplified for smaller orders.

I’d actually prefer the threshold reduced to $25 like Amazon does to encourage more impulsive purchases, but I realize you guys don’t have the same large distribution network to make it happen. Perhaps non-bulky goods could qualify for something like that. Still, at least with this change we can consolidate our orders to avoid getting dimed by the freight charges.

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